


Talking to Thestrals

by OxfordOctopus



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - No Voldemort, Anxiety Disorder, Bullying, Child Neglect, Depression, Dissociation, Gen, Hogwarts, Hogwarts Second Year, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Sirius Black Criticism, Sirius Black Never Went to Azkaban, Suicidal Thoughts, Thestrals, Voldemort (Harry Potter) Dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-30
Updated: 2019-08-30
Packaged: 2020-09-30 20:10:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20452880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: In a world where Voldemort well and truly died in ‘81, where there are no Horcruxes, where Harry is sequestered off by a man in a flying motorcycle when he's six, and where the only legacy the most feared Dark Lord left behind was his politics and a heavily scarred child, nobody quite realizes that Harry isn’t okay.Nobody but the leathery creatures at the lake, and the girl who looks at them.





	Talking to Thestrals

Under no circumstances should apathy feel gentle, but it somehow does. Harry should, he knows, feel like he’s hollow and carved out, empty of meaning and purpose, fragile now that the core of himself has been dredged up and left for someone else.

But it’s gentle, it’s calming. He feels, if not right as rain, the best he has in the last year and it’s because he feels nothing, or rather he feels what it must feel to be unable to feel things; the difference between not touching something and touching it with deadened hand, if without the pins and needles, Harry supposes. The world is whisper-quiet, the landscape is a wash of water like pitch, as black as any ink, and the mountains that crowd the distance, framing the lake he sits at the shore of, are isolated, lonesome, but relieving.

It’s better than crying, better than the grief. Harry idly touches his scars, feels a pang of wonder when the anger and weariness that usually comes just doesn’t, the scars that start at the crown of his forehead and descend down, spreading out like a storm of lightning, branching off and off until it came to encompass the entire surface of it. It’s ugly, for sure, and it stops just after dusting his eyelids and resting against his temples. It is, admittedly, faded, but dark magic scars don’t fade so terribly easy, and it’ll be a pinkish slurry of valleys in his skin until he’s buried and dead and even then they might still see it, if they look at his emaciated corpse close enough.

He is a marked child, marked by a storm of lightning far more than what they said in the papers, journalists imagining fingernail-sized incisions in the wax of his skin in the shape of a crooked sowilo. It’s not a scar easy to hide, it’s impossible to ignore, and it makes him entirely unlike his father, like what they must’ve based his appearance off before he showed up, ruffled hair and closed off, an absentee godfather in tow, back on British soil a few years ago.

Even Sirius doesn’t bother him as much as it maybe should, the thought of him, of him missing for most of the summer, besotted with some woman or man eerily reminiscent of his parents, only coming back once it’s clear he’s never looking at the people themselves, just the echoes of those he can’t have. It could be worse, he knows, the five years he stayed with his aunt and uncle proved that much, their palpable disgust towards him, towards his _freakishness_, had proven that Sirius was the lesser evil, initially his savior. Even so, he hadn’t ever trusted him after his seventh birthday, one spent sitting on the curb while it poured incessantly, afraid and alone in a miserable part of America while the man in question shagged a leggy redhead bartender behind the building, took her home, and only came back to retrieve him once he woke up from his post-sex nap.

Apathy, though, is a nice feeling, empty, like drifting in a void. There’s no warmth, no real feeling of being _there_, of being of importance or being of no importance. There was no meaning, and that was, itself, comforting.

Deadened legs, heavy shoulders, they all drive Harry into a hunch. He’s tired, now that the scaffolding has been plucked out, now that he’s somehow gotten rid of it all. Fragile, no, but tired – that’s certain. Some part of him whispers he ‘ought to drift away, to slip into little nothings, because surely that’s what he meant to do, right? When he’d stumbled down to the lake, tears buried in his eyes, and quietly decided to beg his mind to cut it all away, to burn the feelings he had so he could just _be_.

He wonders if this is accidental magic, but the thought isn’t enough to move him. Eyelids droop, his arms give out and he finds himself laying down, the lake traded for a darkening sky, oranges bleeding into purples and blues, as though leaving behind smudges as the world brushes off the lingering miserable clouds. The thought that he’ll die like this, laying there, too empty to move, to feel, should upset him, should even worry him, but it doesn’t, it couldn’t.

Everything is calm, comfortable, because there is no discomfort. Is he even awake? Or can he even sleep? Is he somewhere trapped between the two, floating on a solid surface?

Eyes shut, the world doesn’t change much.

He wants to die, a little.

Not because he’s suicidal.

But because it would make things even quieter, even darker.

Maybe it would help.

But he’s tired.

Too tired, really.

...

The world is just as quiet as it was before, but he can’t bring himself to open his eyes, to care. He’s stirring again, even if he doesn’t want to, even if he doesn’t want to return, to face things. The world is dark, but it could just be the back of his eyelids.

He doesn’t want to not wake, but neither does he want to wake to begin with.

Detachment doesn’t feel as comfortable as apathy.

It’s almost painful, like he can see what he’s missing, like he’s someplace else. Like he’s in the cupboard again, like he’s staring down sneering classmates again, like he’s waiting for Sirius again, like he’s staring at the lake, pretending not to wish he was at the bottom of it again.

Memories assault him, none of them kind. Harry—that was his name, surely—feels his throat thicken, feels the burn behind his lids and wonders, once again, if he’ll die. The thought prickles across the surface this time, doesn’t let him just accept it, just swallow him with it.

But the numbness is also back, shifting and churning. He must’ve been sleeping then, must’ve dozed off and the moment of wakefulness, and the numbness, the unfeeling, is slower than he is, than the rest of him is. He pries his eyes open, the sky is dark, awash with stars.

“Oh, you’re awake.”

A voice.

Harry turns his head, just enough energy to do so. A younger girl sits there, knees curled up to her chest, saddled in a thick quilt. A lantern sits to her side, a book sits on her lap, and a gaggle of leathery beasts form a semi-circle around her. She offers a bright smile, and it occurs to Harry that he knows her, at least in passing. Lora? Lorelai? Luna? Yes, Luna.

“Thestrals,” she says, without explanation or preamble. “The things around us, I mean. They’re thestrals. They brought me here, or _well_, I followed them, but that’s what they probably meant to do.”

A page is turned in the time between Harry’s answer, and Luna seems content to wait.

“Oh,” his voice is hoarse, even to his own ears. He coughs once, the thickness in his throat worsens, sensation prickles along his body and he notices, absently, that his limbs are cold enough to twinge painfully. It’s odd. “They’re rather ugly,” he says again, even though he isn’t putting enough effort into his voice for it to be anything but monotone, bleak.

A page turns, Harry spies some notes in the margins, all written in what looked to be charmed ink, as each letter is a different color. “That’s not always a bad thing,” she says with some confidence, smiling down at him.

Harry quietly feels like he’s been the butt of a joke, but decides to brush the thought away, the twinge of irritation vanishing almost immediately back into the numb-nothing that envelops his head.

The world returns to, if not silence, white noise. The lantern occasionally creaks from the flame inside of it, the lake occasionally shifts, Luna occasionally turns her book, the air occasionally breezes, and the thestrals occasionally make a noise someplace between a squirrel’s chitter and a horse’s whinny.

“Why?” He asks, finally, finding the energy to speak, though it’s more of a murmur, almost a whisper.

Luna pauses mid-turn. She glances at him, eyes uncomfortably knowing, gaze drilling into him, her attention on him when he’s never seen it focused on anything but something that nobody else could see, that likely wasn’t _there_.

“Because, you’re not fine,” Luna finally says, finishing the motion to turn her page, her eyes returning to the text, to what Harry now realizes is in all likelihood her notes. “Because the thestrals know that too.”

“What do they have to do with it?”

There’s hesitation, now. Luna never hesitates, shouldn't. It worries Harry.

“They crowd around dying things,” she finally says, almost emptily. “Both metaphorically and physically.”

_Oh._ He can’t enunciate it, doesn’t have the energy as that statement drives the breath out of him, makes something heavy and too emotional settle into his stomach. “Am I?”

Luna smiles, but it’s a quiet thing, barely reaches her eyes. “I don’t intend to let it happen.”

She turns the page, again. Harry wonders if she’s reading it at all, or if she’s really just that smart.

“They did the same to me.”

Harry can’t muster a response to that. His breath is shallow, burning now, he doesn’t _want_ to empathize, can’t bring himself to. He shakes his head, arms coming up with an energy he didn’t think he had, to bury the heels of his palms against his eyes, to block it all out. He wishes he had four arms, if only to cover his ears, maybe another two on top of that to cover out the other senses, the ones that now sink into him, reminding him that he’s cold, that he’s very near crying, that the fatigue in his limbs is so heavy his bones could very well cut through his body.

Luna’s hands, gentle but unavoidably firm, pull his hands away, clenches them both as something nasty rolls up from his gut and spits out through clenched teeth, a noisy sob escaping him like a wheezing cough.

“You hate crying,” she says knowingly, firmly. She’s staring again, looking too deep into him, the thought of her understanding breaks a second sob out and tears burn tracks down his cheeks, wetting them with what feels like boiling pitch. “But you have to, or else you’ll end up like this again.”

He doesn’t want to listen but he’s here now, he’s not empty, he’s not detached.

He’s here, and that hurts.

Harry hurts.

“It’s okay.” Luna’s hand smooths down his face, comforting palms, love that had never been offered or thought needed, not with the string of failing adults in his lifetime. A godfather who lost himself, forgetting that his charge had been taken, relatives who hated a child enough to force chores onto him, to beat him. A world that expects his father, expects a twin in everything including personality, only to find a quiet, curious boy who could go no other place but Ravenclaw, who was ill-suited for anything short of a library. “You’ll be alright, eventually. The thestrals know it.”

He doesn’t believe her, can’t. Maybe he might’ve, if his life had been adventurous or he had some greater meaning thrust onto him, but he doesn’t.

Somehow it helps anyway.


End file.
